This course is a compulsory module for Master students of Thai language and culture and can be studied by advanced Bachelor students in the Fachspezifischer Wahlbereich.

For a long time, Thai history has been taught from the perspective of successive Siamese kingdoms and their respective capitals: Sukhothai, Ayutthaya, Thonburi, and Bangkok. The modern Thai nation-state was seen just as a logical continuation of these Siamese kingdoms. Thai historiography heavily relied on written sources in Thai (Siamese) language, such as the royal chronicles of the Ayutthaya and Bangkok periods, but largely neglected the rich source material of the Upper North (Lan Na), the Northeast (Isan) and the South (both the Thai and the Malay South).

These regions comprising more than half of Thailand’s territories had belonged to independent or autonomous polities before their integration into the Thai (Siamese) state since the late eighteenth century and have an historiography of their own. During the last three or four decades Thai historians have challenged the official paradigm by rediscovering regional and local histories, including the history of provinces and localities within the central region of Thailand. Apart from local written sources, many of which were transcribed from manuscripts written in local scripts (Dhamma, Lao, Jawi etc.), also oral history (f.e., interviews with elderly people) was used as a research tool.